Cloud computing is a little bit like sports – we love to talk about the winners, losers, and comebacks.
Cloud computing is one of the most impactful technological innovations since the Internet. Cloud has produced winners such as software-as-a service, losers like traditional software licensing models, and now the comeback of the data center.
In the first wave of cloud computing adoption, application development and testing were largely migrated off of dedicated hardware and into the cloud. The benefits were significant: speed, flexibility, and pay-as-you-go efficiencies.
The second wave of cloud computing adoption is less about migration and more about integration. In this wave, many of the crown jewels of the enterprise application portfolio – those proprietary, large-scale, customized IT systems – are extending the cloud platform by integrating dedicated servers running in secured data centers.
The key is that increasingly the cloud and data centers are coming together to become an IT platform for internet applications and businesses. We call the platform “Cloud + Data Centers,” and we hired Gigaom Research to study the subject and write a white paper. You can download the paper here.
This paper is about the second wave of cloud adoption where the best elements of cloud computing merge with the best elements of data center technologies to create a hybrid platform that changes the discussion from “winners/losers” to “a new game.”

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